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Shes been home more than a week and never said anything to me about it.I went into her room and looked under her pillow. It wasnt there. I looked under her bed, dragging out the storage boxes to find a better view, using my phone as a flashlight.Carla I asked.
Nothing but egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes. The orange piece of paper has been decomposing somewhere under a pile of garbage in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla requested if losing the paper was a big deal.Not actually, I stated. Its just a nuisance, thats all. Ill need to send each of the bitcoins from the Trezor to an online wallet, reinitialize the Trezor, generate a new word list, and place the bitcoins straight back on the Trezor.
Its 551445. The Forgetting: April 4, 2017: 7.4 BTC $8,384I plugged the Trezor into my notebook and entered 551445. Wrong PIN entered.I should have made an error entering the PIN, I thought. I tried 551445 again, taking good care to enter the digits properly this time.Wrong PIN entered.Uh oh. I tried a slight variation: 554445Wrong PIN entered.This is ridiculous, I thought.
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Id entered it at least a dozen occasions in recent months without having to refer to the newspaper. OK, its probably 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked in the tiny monochrome screen on the bitcoin wallet and noticed that a countdown timer had seemed. It was making me wait for a couple of seconds before I could try out another PIN.
I went into the hardware wallet manufacturers site to learn about the PIN delay and read the bad news: The delay doubled every time a wrong PIN was entered. The website said, The number of PIN entry failures is stored in look at this website the Trezors memory. This means that power cycling the Trezor wont magically make the wait time go to zero again.
The thief would have to sit off his life entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you've got enough time to transfer your funds into a new apparatus or wallet from the newspaper backup. (Trezor is based in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The problem was, I was the thief, trying to sneak my own bitcoins back from my Trezor.
Following my sixth incorrect PIN attempt, creeping dread had escalated to heart-pounding panicI may have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I made a couple more guesses, and each time I failed, my sense of unreality grew in proportion to the PIN delay, that was now 2,048 seconds, or about 34 minutes.
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One hundred guesses would take more than 80 sextillion years.I broke the news to Carla. I told her I couldnt recall the PIN and I was being punished every time that I entered an incorrect PIN. She asked me if Id stored the PIN in my 1Password application (a secure password program ).
When she asked me , I didnt have an answer.I knew it'd be a mistake to squander a valuable guess in my condition. My mind had become polluted with scrambled permutations of all PINs. I went into the kitchen to chop veggies for a curry we were making for dinner.
As I cut potatoes into cubes, I mentally shuffled around numbers like they were Scrabble tiles on a rack. After a while, a number popped into my mind: 55144545. This was it! I walked from the kitchen into the office. The Trezor nevertheless had a few hundred seconds left on the countdown timer.
I tapped in 55144545. Wrong PIN entered. Please wait 4,096 seconds to continueI barely slept that night. The small shuteye I managed to have has been filled with nightmares involving combinations of the numbers 1, 4, and 5. It wasnt so much the 8,000 that bothered meit was the shame I felt for being stupid enough to eliminate the newspaper and forget the PIN.
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When I wasnt able to recall the PIN, the Trezor would taunt me for the remainder of my life.The Hunt: April 5, 2017: 7.4 BTC $8,325That morning, bleary eyed, I started looking into methods to receive my bitcoins back that didnt involve recalling my PIN or recovery words. If Id lost my debit card PINI could contact my bank and Id eventually regain access to my funds.
